Year: 2011

Today, we’ve reached the next big milestone on the road to unlocking breakthrough insights across organizations with a cloud-ready information platform—we released Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RC0! You can find the installation media at the Microsoft.com Download Center. When you try it, don’t forget to also download the corresponding Microsoft SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for… Read more

I am very pleased to announce that the DAX Editor for SQL Server has been released to CodePlex for general use. It is available at http://daxeditor.codeplex.com/. Thank you Nick Medveditskov, Karen Aleksanyan, and Sergey Volegov for your hard work in getting this sample up and running. My previous blog post on the DAX Editor provides… Read more

A few weeks back, the SQL Server connectivity team announced on their blog that the SQL Server OLE DB provider is being deprecated and recommended that developers adopt ODBC instead. You can read the blog post in detail here. There has been some concern in the Microsoft BI community about this announcement and how it… Read more

The PowerPivot Configuration Tool included in SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3 is undoubtedly a great new utility for SharePoint administrators. This tool doesn’t just enable you to configure or upgrade PowerPivot in a SharePoint farm. It takes PowerPivot configuration to a whole new level. Here are some key improvements in comparison to what’s available… Read more

Last week I came across a stunning PowerPivot solution that visualizes research data on top of a world map, as illustrated in the following screenshot. What’s particularly stunning about this solution is that it works even in the browser despite the fact that Excel Services doesn’t support custom shapes or background images for country objects… Read more

A few AS team members have started blogging on Denali functionality at their personal blog sites. Cathy Dumas, a Program Manager on our team, is just warming up on her blog. She’s got a couple of interesting posts: Tabular designer architecture Tabular project structure Kasper de Jonge, another Program Manager on our team, has been… Read more

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is an awesome development suite for building advanced Office solutions, such as Excel applications that go above and beyond default features and capabilities. Even our PowerPivot for Excel add-in is based on VSTO. However, it is important to note that VSTO does not define application programming interfaces (APIs)… Read more

Some conversations in our team are really priceless. The other day, while working on an article about Analyzing Performance Data in PowerPivot, I was bragging to Ashvini about the fact that I was able to import a 55 GB database with more than 200 million rows of data into a 1 GB PowerPivot workbook, as… Read more

Probably one of the most frequently requested features we have had for PowerPivot V1 has been the request for a Diagram. As a result we are super excited that the Diagram View found its way through with CTP3 The Diagram View is – as the name suggests – basically a diagrammatic view of the… Read more